When Lady Day Chased The Blues Away-“The Quintessential
Billie Holiday (Volume 3-1936-37)
CD Review
By Music Critic Seth Garth
The Quintessential Billie Holiday, Volume 3, 1936-37
Everybody, at least the everybodies who came of age in the
1950s and 1960s, had at least heard the sad life story and junkie death of the
legendary blue singer Billie Holiday. Knew that information either from having
read her biography, the liner notes on her records (vinyl for those who have
not become hip to the beauties of that old-fashion way to produce recordings),
newspaper obituaries, or from the 1970s film starring Diana Ross (lead singer
of Motown’s Supremes). So everybody knew that Lady Day (I believe that the
Prez, the great saxophonist Lester Young, who backed her on many recordings and
in many a venue gave her that name and it fit her as did that eternal flower in
her hair) had come up the hard way, had had a hard time with men in her life
and had plenty of trouble with junk, with heroin.
Yeah, that is the sad part, the life and times part. But if
you listen to this CD under review, the third volume in the series you will
also know why in the first part of the 21st century guys like me are
still reviewing her work, still haunted by that voice, by that meaningful pause
between notes that carried you to a different place, kept your own blues at
bay. That last statement is really what I want to hone in on here since Billie
Holiday is an acquired taste, and a taste which grows on you as you settle in
to listen to whole albums rather than a single selection. Here is my god’s
honest truth though. Many a blue night when I was young, hell, now too, I would
play Billie for hours and my own silly blues would kind of evaporate. Nice
right. Here is the not nice part. Once a few years ago I was talking to some
young people about Billie and they, maybe under the influence of the film or
from their disapproving parents, kind of wrote her off as just another junkie
gone to seed. I shocked them, I think, when I said if I had had the opportunity
I would have given Billie all the dope she wanted just for taking my own
blues away. That is why we still listen
to that sultry, slinky, sexy voice today.
Is everything in this CD or in her overall work the cat’s
meow. No, toward the end in the 1950s you can tell her voice was hanging by a
thread under the strain of all her troubles, legal and medical. But in the
1930s, the time of her time, covering Tin Pan Alley songs which seem to have
almost been written just for her she had that certain “it” which cannot be
defined but only accepted, accepted gratefully. Check out Pennies From Heaven and I’ve
Got My Love To Keep Me Warm and you will get an idea of what I am talking
about.
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